I agree with this.

I do think we should be skeptical of both valuations and the raw capital investment in AI-related infrastructure, for the very reason you say.

Yeah, I don't agree with everything you said, but I agree with some of it.

I'm not as doom and gloom on knowledge workers. The difference between augmentation (= higher productivity) and displacement is hard to see a priori. Big fan of David Autor's work here.

It’s silly to frame the only viable economic goal as complete obsolescence of specific human professions (vs augmentation).

Unfortunately many of the technology’s most prominent boosters are…silly.

Of course it’s a function of what you do with it.

“Like a PhD but much cheaper” is one application.

“Can do a good job assisting paralegals at document discovery” is another.

There are many profitable applications for much lower parameter models, I bet.

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.

This is really good.

I went to Infowars.com to see if they had new, hilarious content.

They did, but I'm, uh...I'm embarrassed to admit I can't tell if it's parody or still the old Infowars?

Guess I'll check back later.

I mean I guess if the margins are that big it won't matter, which case I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the freakout.

"The lying Democrats couldn't possibly have won Texas or Mississippi when I won in 2024 by 97.5%! It must be Fraud! I hereby declare a National Emergency to restore our Constitutional Order and your beloved President DJT to the White House. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION."

Or something.

It's a foolish mistake (that I make often) to engage in those discussions as if they have anything to do with computer science.

I'm once again reminded that people who have strong opinions on LLMs--pro or anti--are almost always not actually talking about LLMs-the-technology, but how they feel about specific people and institutions behind the technology.

I might have been wrong to assume, given you linked to a Computerworld article and incorrectly summarized the paper, that you did not in fact read it.

If so, I apologize.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

This lofty language has two key caveats: (1) they feel an obligation solely in terms of "defense," not more broadly, such as common welfare, public health, or even democracy; (2) they admit a "debt" yet offer no repayment, instead demanding the exact opposite, that the country pay them even more.
/2

True.

Never missed a flight in my life, and wasted days of it at airports.

But this is exactly what I said?

"We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty."

The authors go on to suggest changes to pre and post-training that can help, so...not unfixable?

Even leaving aside the big philosophical questions about defining "thought" and "cognition", if consumer models mostly try to generate more engagement, that's a critique of the product design, not the underlying tech.

Is that an inherent feature of the technology, though?

It seems to me that you can equally well tune a model to say "I dunno."

Browsing this company's website and the only way I can describe what I'm seeing is imagine a school shooter was a management consultant

The only thing more annoying than Altman’s “im a stochastic parrot and so are u” is the converse “it’s just next-token prediction and incapable of [whatever]”.

Lots of strong assertions being made absent definitions!

“Intelligence” is, I guess, either whatever LLMs don’t have, or whatever they do.

The gold medal for deception: How a professor created an international award out of thin air In 2016, Florent Montaclair stepped into the spotlight when he received the Gold Medal of Philology, a sort of Nobel Prize for the discipline. In fact, the award was created by Montaclair himself. It ...

No, not stamp collecting. Philology!

Only a week? What’s your secret?

This, but more directly, I think the (say) Emiratis understand that all of this is just for show.

"Defense of civilization" is a way to neuter moral criticism, nothing more.

It's frustrating to me that, even as AI coding assistants have made it vastly easier to develop niche software, the two main mobile OSes are horribly exclusive walled gardens.

In the old days, you could publish free software on floppy disks. Now, you have to give Google and Apple a DNA sample.

Corruption and authoritarianism aren't distinct problems, they're two sides of the same coin. Kleptocracy and autocracy go hand in hand, each dependent on the other to sustain itself.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to be That Guy.

But one of the most frustrating parts of this is the implication that taxpayers--who pay the settlement!--probably lack standing to actually do anything, except with Trump as divine tribune to represent them.

It is quite disturbing that there is a justice on the Supreme Court whose objective in being there is to "make [liberals'] lives miserable."

Will it go to the Supreme Court? Aren't the parties to this the IRS and Trump? Who would appeal?

The “Censorship Industrial Complex” was all projection. Someone tell Michael Shellenberger lol. Someone tell Jacob Siegel! 😂

If they can't return all the money they can at least return the tip!

Many great authors engage in vices while creating their art.